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The origins of Silicon Roundabout

This article was taken from the April 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

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Richard Moross needed space. His business, moo.com, had outgrown its Clerkenwell office so he called an estate agent. "He took me to a bunch of places around Old Street," recalls Moross. None suited him, but the agent wasn't finished. "He said, 'There's another space but it's bigger and much more expensive.'" Moross took a look. "It had been an architect's, and I was like, 'We've got to take it.' We took more space than we needed. In order to claw back some of the cost, we let desks to other companies." One of the first to move in was Dopplr.

On Friday nights there were drinks and other local tech companies were invited. On July 23, 2008, Dopplr's CTO Matt Biddulph tweeted "'Silicon Roundabout': the ever-growing community of fun startups in London's Old Street area." It caught the attention of journalists.

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The story took another twist in the summer of 2010, when another east-London-based entrepreneur joined a government-sponsored trade mission to India. "I'm not a Tory but you have the government you have and you work with it," says Matt Webb, CEO and cofounder of design firm BERG.

Webb was also struggling with more prosaic matters. "We were trying to get employment contracts and the lawyers we spoke to only knew how to deal with large companies," he says. It was also hard to find lawyers who understood software sufficiently to advise on suppliers' agreements. "It was frustrating and there was no one I could ask, so I thought: 'I'll go on this trip and I'll ask them to start thinking about how to support the businesses in Silicon Roundabout,'" says Webb. The prime minister's senior policy adviser, Rohan Silva, recalls that, in part, Tech City was born from Webb's prodding. "In his view the scene was fragmented and there weren't enough prompts for people to get together," says Silva.

Less than four months later, David Cameron and Mayor Boris Johnson announced a programme to boost the area's startup cluster. The government has since announced measures aimed at making London more inviting, including an entrepreneur's visa to entice foreign talent and tax breaks for early-stage investors. "It takes time, but already it's looking very different to 18 months ago. When we got in, only six per cent of government contracts went to small- and medium-sized enterprises. Now it's about 16 percent," Silva says.

The building where moo.com started it all is set for redevelopment. The cluster, meanwhile, continues to grow.